Comments on: The delusion of Christians never ceases to amaze…http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436
Exploring God and religion in our world todayFri, 09 Dec 2016 09:58:58 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7By: Thomas Behahttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-17133
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:55:19 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-17133truth – The concept that the world was flat was NOT from the scientist. I believe it was mostly from the religious right type of “middle age / dark age” scribe with some scientific knowledge with a HUGE lack of scientific knowledge.

The “Christian is delusional” isn’t far off at all. They keep trying to predict when the end of the world will happen and keep having to revise who will be the anti-christ and where it will happen and when.

As a ex-christian, believe me stories changes and insights changes within the various christian religions organizations. There is even now christian accepting evolution with various slant of their own.

There are christian who finally get it to take care of our plant earth and attempt to be green.
The christian work ethics was the major reason for the carbon footprint to escalate in the last 50 years like crazy.

truth – you believe in God = fine but please keep it simple and no attachment to the over 6,000 religion organization. As long as your view of God do not include an on-hand approach by him to meddle or fiddle with life in the universe. Carl Sagan knows this isn’t the case and that scientific laws are at work out there moving the planets, suns, galaxies, and dust particles. Earth has gone through transformation that has NOTHING to do with GOD but the stuff of the universe that impacted life on earth one way or another.

Yahweh was a man just like you and me. He indicates in his public speeches and views heavely borrowed from the Egyptians, especially Osiris. I won’t be surprised that the religious leaders encouraged and helped to write the old and new testament to have the religion slant of Osiris. Remember the Jews used to live in Egypt and heard these stories and created their own.

faith – faith is good and a fine way to carry on life with dignity. It just doesn’t have anything to do with gods.

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to… well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else – something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism – where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial – is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid – “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) – to the silly – “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer'”, his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

]]>By: Hermeshttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16890
Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:52:17 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16890(Side note: Sock puppets [one person acting like multiple people] does happen. If you suspect someone is using multiple accounts on the forums, you can flag a post of someone who you suspect is doing it, and the moderators can look into it.)
]]>By: Hermeshttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16889
Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:41:17 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16889RLWemm, come to the forums and judge for yourself. While you are at it, pick one or two comments you’ve seen here that you consider ignorant, and we’ll discuss it;

]]>By: RLWemmhttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16888
Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:04:09 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16888It strikes me as odd that this site gets a bunch of people complaining about the site who claim not to be christian. They all sound as if they have the same level of education and grasp of rational thinking, and the same level of ignorance about the issues raised here. Are they one person posting with different pseudonyms or a multiple personality residing in the same body?
]]>By: Gern Blanstenhttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16867
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:20:03 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16867truth, I want to applaud you for attempting to debate when you are barely literate.

If you have any evidence to support your ramblings, please share.

]]>By: Hermeshttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16865
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:09:32 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16865Anonymous: “if you dont belive in any type of “god” why do you name yourself after one? dude that’s just wierd”

I’m guessing that comment is to me. For that, I look to Homer who said of Hermes;

“[Hermes] whom Maia bare, the rich-tressed Nymphe, when she was joined in love with Zeus,–a shy goddess, for she avoided the company of the blessed gods, and lived within a deep, shady cave. There Kronion used to lie with the rich-tressed Nymphe, unseen by deathless gods and mortal men, at dead of night while sweet sleep should hold white-armed Hera fast. And when the purpose of great Zeus was fixed in heaven, she was delivered and a notable thing was come to pass. For then she bare a son, of many shifts, blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods. Born with the dawning, at mid-day he played on the lyre, and in the evening he stole the cattle of far-shooting Apollo on the fourth day of the month; for on that day queenly Maia bare him.”

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evalutations [sic]of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and ‘rationalisation’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

]]>By: Anonymoushttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16861
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:47:49 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16861“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” (Albert Einstein)
]]>By: truthhttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16860
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:35:45 +0000http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=436#comment-16860Look after reading all the things you all had to say I overreacted to your comments. I am not a Christian but I do belive that God exsits and that Jesus walked the Earth. And I am ashamed to say that there was a time that I didn’t belive and I tought that science was the simple explanation to our exsistence. And no it didn’t take a mircale to belive in God. I am NOT trying to shove religion down your throat because I hated that when people did it to me. I completely understand where your coming from. Trust me.It’s just hard to sit here and read all you have to say about something I belive in. I stumbled onto this web site by accident trust me. But after reading a little I understood what you meant. The thing that totally and completely pissed me off was the whole “Christians are delusional” deal.
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